Daily transportation of bulk cargo and people, while necessary, requires significant limited resources, including time, manpower, expense, and space. In many locations, a large percentage of the daily road traffic consists of local commuters. As cities grow, local traffic becomes an increasingly bigger concern that must be addressed. Adding to the problem of handling daily local traffic, roadways must also be equipped to handle non-local traffic that is passing through area or that is leaving or entering the area from a remote location. This would include, for example, transportation of goods via large trailers and also tourist traffic. This impacts certain areas more than others. Areas that are impacted by this type of traffic includes those having heavily-trafficked interstate exchanges, those with manufacturing facilities that require goods to be shipped into and out of the area, and areas with tourist locations.
A common response to these traffic problems is to expand the capacity of roadways (e.g., adding vehicle lanes, etc.). However, this solution is costly and requires significant planning and time to implement. Additionally, construction sites are dangerous and are a disruption to normal traffic patterns that often lasts for years. Other methods for alleviating traffic issues is to make roadways, vehicles and driving patterns more effective at responding to traffic. For example, certain cities have constructed special express lanes that are reserved for one group of vehicles (e.g., local traffic) while leaving standard roadways for other traffic (e.g., non-local/interstate traffic).
More recently, the idea of platooning vehicles has arisen as a possible solution for traffic issues. Vehicle platooning is a proposed method for partially or fully autonomously operating a group of road vehicles together, with narrow gaps provided between adjacent vehicles. Platooning is proposed to reduce fuel consumption, improve safety and traffic efficiency, etc. A number of vehicle platooning systems have been proposed, including Project SARTRE (Safe Road Trains for the Environment), which defines a platoon (or “road train”) as a collection of electronically-linked “slave vehicles” that automatically follow a manually-driven heavy lead vehicle on conventional roadways. Another project, PATH, has focused on platooning fully automated heavy trucks in a close formation and in a dedicated lane of traffic in order to increase traffic capacity, reduce energy costs, and to improve safety. To be automated, many of these proposed systems require sophisticated sensor systems that provide both longitudinal control (i.e., controlling the distance between one vehicle and vehicles adjacent that vehicle) and lateral control (i.e., controlling the positioning of the vehicle within traffic lanes) of the vehicles. In other cases, extensive modifications or additions to the existing road surface are required (e.g., magnetic markers for use in the lateral control of vehicles, dedicated traffic lanes).
Finally, transportation of bulk cargo and people via rail has also been used in the past. Typically, trains are comprised of several train cars that are linked together and that hold cargo and passengers. These cars are pulled along train tracks by one or more locomotives. Transportation of cargo by rail is typically more fuel efficient and more economical than transportation of that cargo by road vehicle. This is particularly true when large cargo loads are transferred over long distances, but is not true for small loads or short distances. For this reason, transportation by rail is often reserved for long distance travel of large loads. A main disadvantage of rail transport is the lack of flexibility. Since trains are confined to travel on rails, trains may only be used to transport cargo and passengers where rails exist, whereas transport by road is highly flexible.
Another disadvantage of rail transport is that loading a train is time and labor intensive. For example, many goods transported from a factory are often initially loaded onto a truck at the factory by hand, transported to a rail yard on the truck, unloaded from the truck and then loaded onto the train by hand. To maximize cost and efficiency of the train, this process is repeated numerous times to prepare several train cars for simultaneous transport as part of a single train. However, before the train can depart, the train cars must then be organized and connected in a specific order. They are typically grouped based on their final destination, with train cars intended for the same final destination being connected together. At each of the final destinations, goods are, again, manually unloaded from the train car and loaded onto transport vehicles.
What is needed, therefore, is a system and method for transporting cargo and people that addresses the above issues.